Welcome Back! Apologies for a lengthy absence. For various reasons I’ve had a lot on my mind this year – can’t think why. Am about to settle down to read a later social novel by American Nobel Prizewinning novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), creator of an original literary-social archetype, Babbit, in his first great pseudonymous success (1922). Lewis was up there in the American literary pantheon alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald and all the rest, and his death was widely reported at the time, though he was well past his peak by the 1950s; today he is almost forgotten in the fashionable sense, but I think he handled the American social scene (and its villains and victims) with greater acuity than those whose literary reputations remains comparatively undimmed. During the height of the Great Depression and the New Deal of Roosevelt, 1935, Lewis – always viewing the American scene with a sharply critical eye – wrote a novel about ‘a vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering demagogue [who] runs for President of the United States – and wins.’ His name: Buzz Windrip, who ‘promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path…’ (I quote from the Penguin blurb.) Strangely prophetic in the light of a real President of today at the time of writing running for a second (disastrous) term, I’m looking forward to Lewis’s fictional crystal ball. Whether at this moment Donald Trump will squeeze through and win again or not, I am at least pinning my hopes on an erosion of the slim Republican majority in the Senate (the House is almost definitely certain to remain in Democratic hands), for at least if a President has both houses of Congress held by his opposition party his hands are fairly tied – especially in an atmosphere so poisonous as that of today. Well, we shall see. Why should I, a Marxist, take this election so seriously? For the same reason that a German Marxist in the early 1930s would have had good reason – in the light of the goose-stepping outcome - to fear the weaknesses in the opposition to the ‘ridiculous’ Hitler in the 1930s. America is, if anything, in an even more volatile state than Germany was then…

EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967)

Compartment C, Car 193 (1938)

oil on canvas 50.8 x 47.7 cm

Collection IBM Corporation

          I am fascinated by this picture, probably one that is no better- or lesser-known than most of his other works. It is initially the mystery that draws me into it.

          Here we have a young woman sitting in a night train (I’ll come to why I don’t think it is early morning). She is dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down and almost obscuring her downcast eyes as she reads or leafs through unspecified reading matter. She could be dressed for a funeral but it seems more like business clothes, non-chic. She is middle-class, perhaps a secretary or personal assistant. She has a sensuality, characteristic of Hopper in his female portrayals, as marked out by her flaming hair under her sober hat, the shape of her breasts and her crossed legs revealing her knees. But she herself is indifferent to her allure and any sexiness originates solely in the male gaze. We can surmise a fair amount about her but as in all Hopper characterisations, we know virtually nothing about her, let alone what her thoughts may be. 

          Why does she sit one seat away from the window? Have other passengers vacated the compartment? The light cast upon her is the cold, chilling light from the aisle, yet there is a small wall-lamp above her that would make reading easier and cast a warmer glow over the scene, but she has not switched it on. The aisle seat itself is surely draftier than sitting next to the window would be. But how do we know that this woman is sitting with her back to the engine? There is nothing obvious to tell us in which direction the train is travelling. Most train passengers will opt to sit facing the engine and tend to choose vacant facing seats rather than sit out the journey riding backwards (though some feel ‘safer’ with their backs to the engine). In fact she occupies probably the worst seat in the compartment, apparently by choice. Somehow this travelling arrangement is all wrong.

          The scenery is by no means dull. Is the bridge a railroad bridge, and are we approaching it or coming away from it? Beyond that is a dark forest silhouetted by a blazing rising or setting sun. It’s really quite dramatic as scenery from a train goes. But it holds no interest for her. She seems to be reading casually rather than intensively: perhaps the material is travel brochures, like the material lying on the seat beside her. These tend not be exactly riveting. Is she informing herself on where she’s going?

          But how do we know that the train is moving towards rather than away from the setting or rising sun? The composition tells us as much, with a slanting, thrusting angle of the arrow-like windows aiming the train from left to right, in the direction of the twilight, not the opposite direction. If the woman is indifferent to the scenery, to the quality of the light, to the lesser comfort of an aisle seat, why should she not be indifferent to the direction in which the train is moving?

          Perhaps an answer lies in what is directly above her, for this is not a commuter train because of what appears to be a folded-in upper bunk bed. Either the compartment has not yet been prepared as a sleeper or it will not be for this particular compartment for one reason or another. We do not have to be familiar with American sleepers ourselves to know about these things if we have seen such films as ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘North By Northwest’, though the latter has a private stateroom: more expensive than convertible curtained-off sleepers though the latter were more expensive than a day-car only. (The much less comfortable French couchette is a rough equivalent.) Is she waiting for a porter to do the changeover from daytime to night-time use? This would prosaically explain why she is so indifferent to her present surroundings since they will be transformed shortly. And incidentally would tell us that this is an evening rather than early-morning train. (Today our American traveller would be going by a red-eye or short-haul flight.) So, she is not a commuter but going by express on a long or longish overnight journey. One is struck by the barrenness, the chill of the whole. As if she were dressed – for her own funeral. The closed upper bunk could be a metaphorical coffin. She is not facing the engine, looking forward to more life, but is being passively carried to her unknown ‘setting sun’ end, be it soon or much later. Passive lengthy travelling could be yet another Hopper take on isolation and solitariness – a deathly kind of depersonalisation, reached by killing time, which we do quite a lot of – that is, killing our own time. These days we have smartphones for the purpose.  

          Rene Magritte (1898-1967) painted with a meticulous realism of detail the better to create surrealist shocks, forcing us to question our visual assumptions in general. Hopper’s mature style of pictorial realism leads us in its deliberate but selective precision (the details of the paintwork are not ‘mysteries’ in themselves) into facing the essential ambiguity and mystery of other people whom we do not know and – in modern mass society – can never know. But although anonymous to us, and to everyone else, they do have lives, inner lives, of their own: lives that cannot be shared, which would seem to be a main part of living. As she travels along so indifferently and incongruously one feels it must be sad to die not having lived. With Hopper we are secure in what we are allowed to see but made the more unsettled when not unambiguously knowing what we ought to be able to see. This is another way of interpreting what Marx originally identified as alienation.

          (Compare with the more sententious and feel-good American realism of, say, Norman Rockwell.)

Mind Over Matter – Matter Over Mind?

 

          The so-called mind-body problem is one of the major philosophical old chestnuts. What is the ‘mind’, exactly? Where do thoughts come from and do they have some kind of ‘space’ of their own? Are dreams real portents or only caused by having had some cheese before bedtime?

          Religion is fundamentally based on the mind-body duality, or dualism: the mind is implanted by God and could be called another word for ‘soul’, which survives the body after death. Descartes, the great 17^th-century ‘father of modern philosophy’ thought that the mind resided in the pineal gland. (He also believed that only human beings had minds, or souls: animals were automatons of nature, like furry or scaled machines. So we need not mind about killing or maltreating them since they cannot think or even feel very much.)

          An equally great if much misunderstood philosopher of the 17^th century was Benedict de Spinoza, of Amsterdam. His view was entirely different from that of Descartes, and it is largely from Spinoza that the following is drawn. But any faults in the following are mine, not Spinoza’s – one of the greatest thinkers so far who ever lived.

          Thinking in relation to the brain might be considered in the light of an analogy with walking in relation to the legs. Legs are obviously made for walking (and kicking and running and jumping and stretching etc.) but walking as such is not in the legs. The product of walking is a certain distance covered, which is entirely outside the whole body of the legs that walked that distance. This product, or result, is quite outside the brain, outside the head and even outside the body of the walker.

          Spinoza wrote much of substance. Substance is everything material that there is. Thus substance, amongst other things, can think, because human beings are part of substance and they do indeed think: they are thinking substance, so far the only substance in the universe that we know that thinks. And what’s more humans think all the time, even in sleep, when they dream. There is no sharp division between thinking and a reflex action, but a gradating continuum between the two.

          The human brain is indeed the most complex organ or structure that we know of. It is hundreds of billions of times more powerful than the most advanced computer. Yet a minute physical examination of a human brain will not reveal a ‘thought’ residing inside it. You would look in vain for such a thing. And what could a thought possibly look like, even through the most powerful of microscopes?

          This would appear to make the act of thinking something miraculous, non-material, and so many believe that God or gods or spirits of one kind or another have something to do with it. In fact, a thought is a very material thing, which is not to say physical.

          There is no thought without content. Try thinking of nothing: it is impossible. Even a mental relaxation exercise that invites you to think of nothing usually suggests some kind of mental focus on a real or imagined object. You can’t think of nothing at all. Thought is materially determined by objects whether these be in front of you or whether they are recalled from the past or even conjured up by the imagination (itself relying a good deal on memory and past experience). In sleep the mind continues to think in various images, and not without logical progression – indeed, very much with logical progression even if the logic is Wonderland logic. Sensations in sleep derive from wish fulfilment, anxiety, past experience recent or distant or both, sexual desire and sexual antipathy, films or TV movies seen (or amalgams of them) or imagined scenes from literature, whether real literature or an imagined literature, myriad other sources. One thing is certain: dreams do not come from nothing at all.

          If you focus solely on ‘brain’ you get nowhere. If you focus solely on ‘mind’ you get nowhere. You only get somewhere if you see the one in terms of the other, inseparably.  The brain ‘does’ thinking just as the legs ‘do’ walking. But the thinking is focused constantly outside the physical person who thinks (we don’t normally and certainly not instinctively think of the internal workings of the brain itself whereby we do our thinking: everything has an outward focus). Thinking would atrophy and disappear altogether without a brain; likewise a brain that had no thoughts, however rudimentary (and connected, as suggested above, also to reflex actions) would be a dead brain. If the legs are never used, they too will atrophy and grow too weak for walking or much of anything else. And walking does not get done without legs to walk it. Such is the relationship between mind and brain that a usual question is: ‘What’s on your mind?’ not ‘What’s in your brain?’ That would be more for the neurosurgeon to query. And of course an impaired brain hampers thought just as a broken leg hampers leg exercise. But source and activity in both these examples are wholly and necessarily and constantly reciprocal.

          Thus half of your bodily existence is outside you. Your mind does not reside in the head, but in the head and in everything outside the head that causes thinking and includes such indispensably social things as languages. Language can only come into existence between and among human beings. If there was no one to communicate with there would be no language because of no use for it. And it is from the use of language invented for social reasons that we have learned to verbalise our internal thoughts: our thoughts are expressed, if silently, through words.  But the word is, if you like, a social organ. And so is your mind.  We would do well to reflect on the half-part of each of us that actually exists outside our bodies and in the world around, of things, people, ideas. These in turn are the necessary food for the mind operating through the body. Physically, 40% of the oxygen we take in goes to the brain, an enormously expensive organ to keep up. As we breathe air (which climate change deniers are in danger of forgetting when they declare their intention to burn down oxygen-producing rainforests) and die after only perhaps at most about a few minutes without it, so we ‘think’ what is around us and our thoughts contribute to that outer part of ourselves, in a reciprocal relationship.

          In view of the way much of the human world treats its children, who have growing brains and minds to feed, it is time that people were made more aware of how much we all live outside our physical bodies, in so many daily ways.

         

HA-JOON CHANG: Caveat Emptor!

 

          Known through his Guardian contributions but also for his bestseller 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang is a lecturer in economics at Cambridge University. In terms of theory he would appear to be something of a Left Keynesian, believing that capitalism should be tempered by enlightened state intervention and brought towards a more equitable society. Meanwhile, he is an engaging writer well-suited to the task of providing Economics: The User’s Guide, a Pelican Introduction, for the layperson (2014).

Up to a point.

          Amongst those he thanks in his Acknowledgements are Leftwing and sometime fellow Guardian columnists Seumas Milne (now working to get Corbyn’s Labour elected) and Aditya Chakrabortty, as well as eminent Marxist economist and Leftwing Greek politician Costas Lapavitsas, author of Profiting Without Producing (2013).

          For all that, Ha-Joon Chang is surprisingly ill-informed about Marx and Marxism, one of his thumbnail sketches of all the various economic schools from Classic Political Economy to the Austrian School, Keynesianism and Neo-Classicism, etc. For each, he weighs up their various pros and cons. His verdict on Marxism: ‘Fatally flawed, but still useful: theories of the firm, work, and technological progress.’

          The worst flaw: ‘Above all, its prediction that capitalism will collapse under its own weight has not come true.’

          Marx was not in the habit of ‘predicting’ anything, and certainly not that any capitalist ‘collapse’ is inevitable. Capital will end with its expropriation from its owners by the proletariat, capital’s ‘gravediggers’, but this is more of a threat and rallying-cry than a prediction.  Otherwise capital as a system might linger over a long period of time, but the proletariat is the only class or factor that can destroy it. Marx was not a revolutionary activist for nothing. He saw history as class struggle, and in our time the only means by which socialism would come about. Marx did not predict when and where socialist revolution would come about. (In later life he became interested in the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry and even learned Russian from scratch to follow the literature more closely.) Meanwhile, the idea that capitalism can destroy itself without class intervention is contrary to Marx’s entire outlook. And such intervention is to be fought for, not ‘predicted’. His critique of the capital system was to enable workers to understand its workings in its entirety: to fight your enemy, you must know it.

          Chang: ‘The collapse of the socialist bloc has revealed that the Marxian theory of how the alternative to capitalism should be organised was highly inadequate. The list goes on.’ Not in this book. (All citations from 131-132.) Marx spurned utopians with their theories of how a future society should be created, keeping well away from such prognostications himself. It was up to the workers to self-organize a new society on the basis of ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’. Marx’s ‘theory’ here is indeed highly inadequate because it doesn’t exist and never did. Marx did not do fanciful system-building. 

          In any case the ‘socialist bloc’ was state capitalist, not socialist. That is, it was an exploitative system. Workers in Soviet Russia, like everywhere else, produced surplus value from unpaid labour-time which accrued to state enterprise as opposed to private. After the fall, in 1991, the transfer of state ownership to private was both swift and corrupt.

          Neither Lenin nor Trotsky had any illusions that they were creating socialism in Russia after 1917. They looked to impending Western socialist revolutions to give their own a kick start. When these failed to attain ascendancy, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to improvise in a desperately isolated situation, the alternative being the anarchy of a power vacuum. It was Stalin who drove through industrialisation, at a furious pace, on the non-Marxist slogan of ‘socialism in one country’. At huge and tragic human cost it worked: Russia was modernised to the point where it would defeat Germany in World War II (and indeed send the first unmanned space vehicle, Sputnik I, into orbit in 1957 – not the first ‘manned’ one, as Chang writes on p. 95). But industrialisation was initially achieved on the basis of mass forced labour, whether ‘free’ or enslaved. It was never socialism, let alone Marxian socialism, whatever the ideology put forward.

          Chang is reasonably informative on some aspects of Marx’s contribution to ‘economics’ (though Marx's study remained within ‘political economy’, not the truncated form known to us as ‘economics’). But, just as the word ‘critique’ appears in the title of his major political economic writings, Marx was a forensic tearer-down of a system, not the builder of a new one. For him socialism would be what the triumph of a non-exploitative proletariat made it. And, to be frank, Chang’s conclusion on Marx’s ‘flaws’ is shoddy thinking: raising an old canard that is easily disposed of.

         

         

Socialism means never having to say you’re sorry…

                  (apologies to Erich Segal, Love Story, Hollywood 1970)

 

          Capital profit after sales is drawn from surplus value, that is, what remains when wages, production costs and obligations have been met. This in turn derives from how much value the workers produce which does not return to them in the form of wages for the whole time worked. Labour-power is the commodity a capitalist buys which increases value in production; raw materials and machines simply pass on their own value with nothing added (and machines depreciate). The value of labour-time is made up of the socially-necessary cost of the individual worker, including sustenance, shelter, clothing, transport, education etc. – and the raising of future workers. The worker works for say, ten hours but is paid back his or her value for, say, five of these hours. The value created during the rest of the hours goes to the employer. Because unpaid labour-power alone grows value in the production process, it is the basis of capitalist profit. Workers produce surplus value because of the difference between their wages and the value that their labour-power produces.

          To optimise the productivity of this effort, and to withstand competitors over – say – sale prices, productivity per worker is generally increased when supplied with ever-more efficient and up-to-date machines (means of production – ‘dead labour’ in Marx’s terminology) but this will likely reduce the number of workers needed unless there is a growth in output due to increased demand. Automation is feasible so long as there are areas within the economy as a whole which are not automated, and as long as we need human workers to build the robots. With total automation surplus value diminishes; such living workers that are left will be more drastically exploited therefore to maintain surplus value ( as at Amazon - more of this anon). To compete with rivals over market prices, capitalists are forced into ever-greater modernisation and automation to achieve higher speeds in greater output, and so to saw off the branch of the tree they are sitting on. And so expansion must be rampant, because one answer to a decline in surplus value-created profit is to increase the scale of the operation and either expand the market or expand the company’s share of the market, frequently by buying out rivals or creating mergers. There is also the profit in buying cheap and selling dear as found from foreign trade. Another means is to keep wages static or reduced so that more surplus value accrues to the capitalist, requiring perhaps the prohibition of strikes and/or unions, or by expanding production into the low-wage economies of developing countries or backward regions of one’s own. Many products we consume are made by poorly-paid women, as well as children: illegally in countries where child labour laws exist but are not enforced.  For example, Amazon’s supplier Foxconn exploits children in the manufacture of Alexa in China, a flouting of Chinese labour laws. (Guardian, 9^th August 2019).

          The capitalist paradox is that the goods made or services produced have to be sold to a plenitude of buyers on the market, by and large the selfsame workers who, in a Western country like the UK, make up about 80% of the population. The capitalist needs to beat down wages as best he or she can, but at the same time relies on the beaten to buy the goods, otherwise the capitalist is likely to be ruined. Gluts appear when unsold goods lie piled up in factories or warehouses, or airline tickets cannot be sold. Indeed, with the resulting unemployment, the remaining workers have no bargaining position and so the embattled capitalist must cut their wages further. Or, what amounts to the same economic result, we have usually temporary full employment through sub-low wages, no fringe benefits or pensions, and insecure contracts, with fragmentation of the workforce.

          The ‘answer’ to ‘under-consumption’ lies in easy credit for workers to enable them to carry on purchasing. Consumption is a form of production, producing the ‘demand’ for the goods and services created by the workers themselves. But the usury involved can be merciless, perhaps up to £1000% p.a. – another form of ‘production’ exploitation by the merchant-capital end of capitalism, which pre-dates industrial capital. But recourse to ‘easy credit’ has a limited lifespan before towering debts set in. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgages in the USA which led to the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008 is a good example of this. And sub-primes are back!

An alternative is a more generous public social and health provision which would put steady purchasing within the workers’ reach. But capitalist gain from healthier market sales as a result is nullified by the state’s taxes needed to pay for it. From the capitalist point of view, this is Peter (the capitalist) being robbed to pay Paul (the worker). The bulk of taxes needed to fund this provision – if one includes corporation tax – falls on the employer class. Of individuals, 43% of adults in the UK pay no income taxes (up from 38% in 2010), while individual adults in the top 1% pay 27% of the whole income tax revenue. (Daily Telegraph, 6th August 2019). Of course poll taxes like National Insurance and VAT on commodities and services hit all classes but most adversely the low-paid.

Public incursion into the economy has wider implications. State profits from public enterprises are ploughed back into the state coffers, unavailable to private investment. When the East Coast Line was returned to public ownership, the service became more efficient and the Treasury was the recipient of the profits, having previously been the loser in making over enormous subsidies to private investors. It worked well as a public railway, but the point was that it shut out the private investor, which made the East Coast Line’s return to private ownership as soon after the mess from previous privatisations had been cleared up absolutely necessary from the capitalist viewpoint. With the long-term decline in the overall rate of profit, state funding of railways, health, social services, housing and so on is seen as the competitor for dwindling private investment opportunities.

At one time – for example with civic ‘gas and water socialism’ from the so-called Progressive Era in turn-of-the-20^th-century America and the urgent need for vast infrastructural repair in post-World-War-II Britain – the state took on production activities beyond the investment capabilities of private capital, and indeed was a necessary supplier to the latter in terms of cheap energy (business, as in pre-privatising Britain, usually gained lower rates for energy supplies from the state suppliers than did domestic users) while mass cheap public transport was necessary if the workforce were to arrive at the factories and shops on time! But in time, as traditional areas of private investment failed to soak up increasing capital accumulations, new opportunities had to be found, at home and abroad; at home they presented themselves as the already-formed and functioning (and often profitable) state-run facilities. ‘State’ capitalism becomes absorbed by actual private capital, with the added advantage that taxes can be appropriated as ‘subsidies’ to privatised companies from the state after their privatisation, and so less ‘wasted’ on social goods and services. ‘Subsidies’ also include elaborate legal forms of tax avoidance.

Meanwhile, capitalist expansion and the world market in the post-war years were sufficient to bring in a higher rate of profit than today’s, even though the highest tax-rate in the three decades after the war was the equivalent of 93 pence in the pound in Britain and similar to the dollar in the USA! Now capitalism in both countries can barely struggle along, it seems, on a top tax rate of 40%.

          In this context, Labour’s aim to bring back – at least in part – the socialism of Attlee’s Labour (1945-51) looks quixotic or cranky to today’s neoliberal world – and dangerous. Social wealth is not necessarily capital wealth, except where for example council housebuilding is undertaken by private contractors. A public park or playing-field is absolutely valueless because the land is not being monetised for production, private housing or even privately-run fairgrounds. Capital must therefore buy up as much green space as possible for investment purposes. Everything ultimately should be privately owned, if publicly subsidised – even the Houses of Parliament if this were ever to be pushed through (for say, luxury apartments). For capitalists social-democratic Labour’s present plans represent the thin edge of the wedge for a larger demonetisation, which spells doom for capital and capitalism. The present Right-wing urgency to monetise everything in sight is propelled by capital’s now-chronic fall in overall rate of profit. Capital survives by expansion and ever-further exploitation: so Labour has got to be steamrollered over (for a programme that looks mild by comparison to the post-World War II Labour agenda) or else Labour must itself reverse the trend to monetisation by turning demonetisation into the new ‘trend’. This it can only do if it is genuinely a mass movement of colossal proportions.

*  * *

          The 1% plus the rest of the better-off 20% might indeed save capitalism as the growth in minority wealth (especially at the higher end of this category) provides expansion in luxury production. This turns out yachts, private jets, helicopters, luxury cars, expensive properties, precious gems, private schools, hospitals and clinics, wines at £100 and £1000 a bottle, prestigiously-labelled cosmetics, accessories and clothes, exclusive resorts, clubs, restaurants and hotels, etc. A certain amount of this may be viewed in TV advertising today. This side of the market could conceivably keep capitalism going forever, whatever the penury of the many. However, tensions appear within the higher classes. Billionaires (growing in numbers if not profusely) can swallow up skilled labour and force up prices that millionaires can no longer access and afford, while those on £100,000 a year will begin to feel themselves pauperised not to speak of those on a mere £60,000 or so. What about army generals, US senators, top-grade civil servants and judges who can no longer access what they had been used to accessing due to the shock-effects of the ever-greater purchasing powers of the seriously rich?  How many revolutions and coups have been instigated around the world by malcontent colonels? What about fascism drawing from the resentments of a middle-class that feels ‘cheated’ out of what it believes are rightfully its own? If I were a millionaire as opposed to how I am presently placed I feel sure I would resent billionaires much more than in fact I do, because billionaires can arrogate to themselves what millionaires felt was within their grasp, or almost. Who is content with the second-best thing when the first-best seems so nearly reachable? Who will never live in ‘Millionaires Row’ in Kensington because it has become exclusively ‘Billionaires Row’? What happens when trillionaires come on the scene? Disputes over property development in high-class neighbourhoods show what happens when the richer neighbour attempts to flaunt what is his by means of seemingly outrageous development. Land is certainly not increasing even if private wealth amongst the 0.01% of the 1% is - exponentially. And with climate change we will see areas such as coastal regions and cities flooded by rising sea levels, which means even less land than now for the accumulated billionaire wealth to get its claws into, at the expense of everyone else. Indeed, true wealth is best characterised by the amount of fossil-fuel consumption it uses per capita. So we should be expropriating our billionaires before they expropriate all of us.  And before the trillionaires arrive.

* * *

     Findings of the Peterson Institute (Washington DC) have shown Phillip Inman that ‘wage stagnation in the US (and therefore probably the UK too) is more likely to be caused by technology hollowing out the market for skilled blue- and white-collar jobs rather than competition with China and the Far East. This tells us there are fundamental issues to confront aside from the loss of access to our biggest trading partner, the EU’. (Observer, August 4^th 2019.)

     I’d suggest that automation poses an existential threat to capitalism in general because it diminishes the profit-side of surplus value, the basis for the enrichment of a system deriving its profit from working human beings. A robot transfers its value to the product but does not make the operation more profitable as a result because a robot cannot be exploited. Those who make them can be, but not after robots start producing themselves. Robots are just one more machine cost. ‘Wage stagnation’ for existing US workers shows this: that there isn’t enough in the kitty to pay proper living wages and show a profit at the same time. Automation is ideal for socialism because it can eliminate soul-destroying work without a need for a profit as a result. The ‘profit’ comes in the form of life fulfilment through creative activities and caring opportunities.  But without socialism an outdated, outmoded capitalist system will become ever more desperately repressive and oppressive in a semi-automated and then more fully automated society. Perhaps the ‘hand-made’ luxury industries might hold out but they could not carry on in a non-capitalist wider context. The system is total or it is not at all. And faced with the need to ‘blow the expense’ in saving the world from burning up, we must socialise all production while democratising how we are to govern ourselves, and we must do this now.

     Meanwhile capitalists are becoming so anomalous that right now it would be in their best interests to turn into Luddites, their worst working-class enemies 200 years ago: smash the machines, before they smash you! 

 

SUMMER ANNOUNCEMENT

 

Just to say that there will be a bit of a break from blogging over this period -  in any case we have to go through a hiatus as Boris Johnson, who won the premiership of Britain with an overwhelming mandate from the (Conservative) people takes us round the houses, promises everybody everything and gears up to win the expected general election. With persistent undermining, from within and without, of Jeremy Corbyn, we may find ourselves without a Labour spearhead just when we need one, though one hopes this doesn't happen. A letter in one of yesterday’s papers put forward Sir Keir Starmer as a likely and worthy successor to Corbyn and more likely to beat Boris Johnson than anyone else. Sir Keir has many admirable qualities but he is about as charismatic as a telegraph pole. By mere coincidence he also happens to be on the Right in the Labour Party.

 

Labour is right to keep the options open as between Remain and Leave. Opinion polls are notoriously treacherous and no more so than in febrile times like ours now. If they look like anything, they look like a public being wilfully confused over what to think about anything. This does not amount to a ‘mandate’.  But it is likely that the world systemic crisis involving economies, politics, societies and warfare is deepening together with the ever-underlying (and not so underlying) imminence of global warming. This allows nihilist ‘leaders’, either intentionally or unintentionally funny, to caper about in Britain, the USA, Italy, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel with no need to resort to consistency, truth, realism, strategy (except by backroom boys) so long as they can keep the plates spinning. This is unstable; in history the truth will always will out. That is why for Hegel the true was the real: that is, real by dint of being the real outcome to movement of events. It is also necessary, because it is there. The truth in the real outcome has unmasked (nearly) every charlatan in modern history. But, alas, too late to prevent the damage being done.

          When the only possible leaders turn out to be fools and/or charlatans, then it is time for us masses to demolish the leadership principle altogether. And with it the structures that rely on leadership in the form of single-person ‘charismatic’ rule. Corbyn in this sense is way ahead of Johnson: he has no wish to be a ‘leader’ in the charismatic, individualist/egoist sense, and this is what shows up the obsolescence of the leadership principle, a principle that Johnson and Trump embody for our times.

SNIPPETS

 

          Assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, Neil Nasu, has raised a stink especially among newspaper editors and politicians over his claim that publishing the contents of leaked government documents could be ‘a criminal matter’. Boris Johnson said: prosecution ‘would amount to an infringement on press freedom and have a chilling effect on public debate’. Indeed if leaks could not be disseminated without prosecution (especially if that includes social media) then surely there would be no more leaks? If no one outside the government had access to the material, why leak it?  We could have leak-free government, thus keeping the press and so on minding their manners. Anyhow it seems unfair for Julian Assange, likely to be dragged off to the United States, of which he is not a citizen, to be tried for ‘treason’ and most likely executed, while allowing those writers and editors of, for example, the Guardian in London, to be let off scott-free after having disseminated what Assange supplied them with. Is there no way we can get the large bulk of the Guardian editorial staff shipped off to America on treason charges as well? The present situation has no logic at all, let alone justice, and it seems apparent from Neil Basu’s statements that he is nothing if not logical and justice-minded.

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A celebration of the wise virtues of white racist President Trump was flourished across the Letters page of this week’s Mail on Sunday (July 14^th,2019)  which led me to look into similar letters written to the German newspapers in the 1930s, of which the following is a representative example:

Dear Sir: I am outraged by the vituperative and even obscene remarks made by irresponsible journalists and politicians around the world about our Chancellor and Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Since he came to power with Germany First in mind, our divisive politics has been swept away, the economy is on the rise with full employment after years of unemployment misery. The future of motoring is bright as we see the construction of a whole network of autobahns, and the Fuhrer has even promised a cheap affordable People’s Car that will place motoring in the hands of millions who could never aspire to it before. The Jewish problem is all but solved and we will no longer find homosexuals able to mingle freely with us and corrupting our children. He has brought self-respect to the German nation and people with his aim to arm Germany in a manner befitting a great land but at the same time has declared ‘I have no further territorial demands to make in Europe’, so we have peace with honour. Why don’t the foreigners come to terms with Adolf Hitler’s stunning achievements?

 

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According to the Morning Star for July 13^th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the visiting head of the Ukrainian Radical Party, Oleh Lyashko, a member of the party’s delegation to Jerusalem. In 2015 Mr Lyashko attacked Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko ‘over his apology for the actions of nazi collaborators during the Holocaust, branding it a “humiliation”.’ The party itself is openly fascist. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Netanyahu has been criticised for not doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism. Hardly surprising when in 2015 Mr Netanyahu stated that Hitler had had no intention of exterminating Europe’s Jews ‘until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it’. 

Who was this mysterious Palestinian with access to the Fuhrer’s ear in Nazi Germany? A gardener at Berchtesgaden perhaps?

So why was a fascist Ukrainian party visiting Jerusalem and meeting with Mr Netanyahu at all? Why had Mr Netanyahu been at pains to exonerate Hitler? ~Why is he so friendly with the anti-Semitic President Orben of Hungary? And, for that matter, if Labour is so riddled with anti-Semites, why has no official Labour party delegation been invited to Israel? Or is Mr Netanyahu not entirely convinced of Mr Corbyn’s anti-Semitic credentials?